Survival

[can't sit still]

85 to 97 % of Argentinians are white descendants of German and Italian ancestry.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Argentine
They were rioting because the bank controlled GOV took their savings, investments and pensions. They stiffed the foreign bond holders too.
"Every night thousands of cartoneros, loosely translated as “scavengers,â€

[can't sit still]

Damn, I lost my references for the post of a possible timeline. As you well know, employment is a huge factor in survival. Here's a page showing the advancement of unemployment. http://cohort11.americanobserver.net/la ... final.html
Kunstler said that there is a new realization this week of just how broke we are. He tends to be on the gloomy side.
http://www.24hgold.com/english/contribu ... stler&mk=1

[Rabbi Dali Rick]

My own guess is that there may not even be a president of the US after Mr. Obama. Rather, events will get so gnarly and disordered so fast that somebody like General Patraeus will have to step in for a while and keep the reincarnation of the Ku Klux Klan from trying to murder every non-Cracker from sea to shining sea. Of course, once that happens, we probably don't go back. It's not Imperial Rome (release 2.0) after that, either, because even the mighty US military will be too strapped for a means of support to continue operating. Instead, it's the devolution of the US into functionally autonomous regions and states -- and even that scale of governance may be too great for the stringent economic realities of the years ahead.

I'm ready...



the rebbi

[can't sit still]

Rabbi, when you say that you're ready,,,, in WHAT way do you mean "ready"
Kunstler is a big "peak oil" guy. Peak oil,,, just like Malthus's predictions has been delayed by new tech. Since the Russians and Brazilians have been so spectacularly successful at turning up 'deep oil" all over the world, peak oil is still quite a way off. The world is currently flooded with discoveries. It is speculated that the blowout on the gulf was an act of desperation to try to maintain some kind of semblance of scarcity.
Peak gas has also been dealt a deadly blow by recent discoveries in Iran. The only hope of Big Oil to maintain scarcity is to maybe blow up Iran. There is nothing but bad news out of Canada and Alaska too. Way too many discoveries of petroleum.

Being ready means having the ability to get far away from the mobs. If welfare is indeed cut off, there are going to be a lot of unhappy campers. Watch out for unhappy campers.

[Rabbi Dali Rick]

Well it has nothing to do with food and money shortages. with the deep freezes, flooding, and oil leaks, food prices will be high for the next year or so.




the rebbi

[unjonharley]

I'm looking at some gardening indoors in a cabinet.. Some of my outdoor plants have stuff falling on them from open sky.. Also discovering more and more plant will hang upside down.. Beans peas and strawberries go in hanging planters and strech to the ground... Saves this poor old back..

[ygmir]

Rabbi, when you say that you're ready,,,, in WHAT way do you mean "ready"
Kunstler is a big "peak oil" guy. Peak oil,,, just like Malthus's predictions has been delayed by new tech. Since the Russians and Brazilians have been so spectacularly successful at turning up 'deep oil" all over the world, peak oil is still quite a way off. The world is currently flooded with discoveries. It is speculated that the blowout on the gulf was an act of desperation to try to maintain some kind of semblance of scarcity.
Peak gas has also been dealt a deadly blow by recent discoveries in Iran. The only hope of Big Oil to maintain scarcity is to maybe blow up Iran. There is nothing but bad news out of Canada and Alaska too. Way too many discoveries of petroleum.

Being ready means having the ability to get far away from the mobs. If welfare is indeed cut off, there are going to be a lot of unhappy campers. Watch out for unhappy campers.

lemmee guess, rebi:

thump, thump, thump.........rat a tat-tat........zing.....pow.........thud........

repeat:

"song sung my M-2 and M-60, accompanied by M-16"

[can't sit still]

Well, gyre seems to be the resident expert in living in an ultra-dangerous neighborhood. I wouldn't wish it on anybody. I don't ever want to be put in the position of having to kill somebody. Like Costner's character said in "waterworld",,, "killins not easy". I've strenuously avoided being put in that position because I was terribly afraid that it would be TOO easy the second time.
"Can't we all just get along?"

[can't sit still]

I guess this thread has temporarily morphed into an unemployment thread.
"Credit agency Dun & Bradstreet has delivered a blunt warning to SMEs about the patchy state of the economic recovery, warning it downgraded the risk profiles of a staggering 80,000 firms during the March quarter – a greater number of firms than were downgraded during the first quarter of 2009."
http://www.smartcompany.com.au/cashflow ... treet.html
I see companies everywhere who were just holding on, waiting for a recovery. They never managed to open their eyes and see that the economy was changed permanently. How many of these companies outsourced work overseas?

[Rabbi Dali Rick]

it is so sad to see those people watch their dreams evaporate right in front of them and take their life savings and any money they had set aside and just drain them dry, leaving little more than a husk. Once completly drained of all hope they are kicked to the curb, and replaced by some poor sap whose has swallowed the party line, and believe that now is the time to start a business, buy some property, buy a car. Ok here's the deal it won't get any better anytime soon. So deal with it and make decisions accordingly.


the rebbi

[ygmir]

the thing about buying real estate (IMHO), is, it has two advantages:
one is, people need to live somewhere, and, no matter the level, there is always a rental market.
second, is, real estate values always stay "relative" (except of unusual circumstances like natural disasters). IE: if 10 acres and a house, is equal in value to 40 acres and a house somewhere else, no matter the price, the ratio usually remains.

just a thought.

[Sail Man]

lemmee guess, rebi:

thump, thump, thump.........rat a tat-tat........zing.....pow.........thud........

repeat:

"song sung my M-203 and M-60, accompanied by M-16"

Here Ygmir, i fixed it for you, now your singing my song too from my military days

[Rabbi Dali Rick]

the thing about buying real estate (IMHO), is, it has two advantages:
one is, people need to live somewhere, and, no matter the level, there is always a rental market.
second, is, real estate values always stay "relative" (except of unusual circumstances like natural disasters). IE: if 10 acres and a house, is equal in value to 40 acres and a house somewhere else, no matter the price, the ratio usually remains.

just a thought.

Nice in theory, but even if a loaf of bread cost a nickel, and you don't have a nickel, it means you don't get any bread. If you don't have any money, I don't care how cheap they make something, your broke ass won't be able to afford it.

They announced this morning about an uptick of 25% in the unemployment stats because of omissions and errors in the original computing of the number. More, and more people are finding that, not only have their jobs gone away, but jobs by the hundreds, are evaporating around us daily, as people stop spending, and go into survival modes. The money you see being spent is people preparing for the worst not the usual discretionary spending on unnecessary stuff like just last quarter.

Gas prices will skyrocket, not because of scarcity but because the oil company will not want to pony up the billions in loss on the gulf clean up and containment operation. We all know that all the major oil companies (Shell, 76, Arco etc) are nothing more than shells of the previous market incantation and just dummy corps operating under one umbrella, all actually owned by just one company. As and as people savings run out more and more middle class are added to the legions of the poor, losing their homes, cars, and sell long term investments at bargain basement prices in an attempt to hold onto their shallow, disintegrating lifestyle, in an all out attempt to keep up the appearance that all is well (while they secretly eat catfood to survive).


The commercial real is getting ready to take a dump as more and more business fail, leaving places empty.


the rebbi

[can't sit still]

Real estate is a good bet if it is farmland and you plan to cultivate it.... AND it has an assured water supply.
China moved 300 MILLION peasants from the countryside to the cities. The West will need to move 300 MILLION from the cities to the countryside. Simple arithmetic.
When the industrial economy fails, we just have to fall back on the agrarian economy. People lacking that opportunity will have to become hunter-gatherers,, like to "cartoneros" in Argentina. Or, one could move in with grandpa Haliburton.

[can't sit still]

Well, the new GOV in GB has just announced huge cuts;
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot. ... e-axe.html
"there is no money,â€

[can't sit still]

Well, once more, I'm back to jobs. Those of you who have lost work probably have a new-found realization of the importance of a steady income. The predations of the banks were so extractive that the economy doesn't have enough "working capital" The more permanent problem is the inroads and reductions brought about by increasing automation. The Daily Bell accused me of being a "Luddite" . They just don't have the vision to see that most of the new jobs created are only applicable to automation.

Look at bio-tech. How many people are manually doing genetic sequencing? How many people are manually assembling cell phones? IF there is a call for manual labor, BRIC will be happy to perform the service at 4 % of what it costs for labor in the West.

In an off-hand way, GOV is admitting that it can't create jobs. Here are the numbers.
"The White House estimates that it takes approximately $92,000 of government spending to create one job in the US."
"each job in the US economy generates $105,000 in GDP"
"But further digging reveals that the actual cost to save or create one job in the US was $117,933 per job from February to December 2009."
"doesn't incorporate the fact that the $92,000 (or $117,933) spent to create it was BORROWED. "
http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2010/ ... t_a_b.html

SO, GOV spends $ 117,933 of borrowed money to 'create ONE job.

In the 30s and 40s, about 44 % of Americans worked on the farm. When farming was mechanized and automated, these workers moved to manufacturing.
The industrial revolution created tons of new jobs in resource extraction and manufacturing. A big percentage of those jobs have been automated. and / or outsourced to lower-wage markets.
How can the West possibly compete if it costs $ 117,933 to create a new job?
The world is flooded with manufacturing capacity and willing workers. But, we're in the machine age. The machines have little need for us.
This isn't just in manufacturing. Everything from Coke machines to CAD to tax preparation software. Accounting, advertising, printing, publishing. Many industries take fewer and fewer people to manage a larger and larger volumes of commerce.

In the age of "instant duplication", the newspaper industry is crashing. The music industry is struggling.
GOV created credit growth at 5 times the GDP growth. As it collapses, the artificial demand for workers will disappear.
Here's a graph of the job situation;
http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/201 ... ate-get-it
The U.S. needs to create 125,000 jobs every month just to keep even with population growth. There are plenty of people who claim that GOV could easily create all the jobs that we need.
http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/201 ... s-we-need/
These ideas don't address the fundamental problems. They would just give us a "Japan" style recovery. GOV spends Trillions of people's savings to keep them employed.
The usual solution to over-capacity is have a war and destroy your enemy's / competitor's capacity. In the meantime, while waiting for war, find a job in an industry that is an absolute necessity,,, like trash collection

[can't sit still]

Well, the indicators just keep crashing faster and faster. ALL of this stuff will have a negative effect on employment;
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/arch ... -countdown
The party was fun while it lasted. While we borrowed money so that we could cruise around on dune buggies and jetskis, the rest of the world was hard at work.
We worked too but, we spent far more than we earned. We had a huge gap in pay between workers and management / owners. In Viet-Nam, an IT manager earns $ 15,470 a year. http://www.mercer.com/pressrelease/deta ... nt=1284940
The jobs just naturally gravitated to the low-wage markets.

We over-extended the party,, on borrowed money. The bill is coming due. We can't pay. As it all collapses, we're falling into deflation. The states need hundreds of $ trillions to "extend and pretend" They've already borrowed $ 37 billion to pay unemployment.
Ca pension funding shortfall is 1 /2 trillion. The other states are equally screwed.

Ca historically spent $ 10 billion more each year than it brought in. There is going to be a whole lot less money in circulation. GOV is hard at work trying to create currency inflation. They're hoping to do the trick with a minimum of price inflation.
It's expected that deflation will continue for 1 1/2 years. Then, it's expected that hyperinflation will kick in. Either one of these will be bad for employment.

[can't sit still]

Here's some snippets that are interesting;

"Forty years ago," said an Englishman on the phone yesterday, "Britain had 8 million people in manufacturing, making things, and 3 million people on the public payroll, consuming them. Now, those numbers have almost completely reversed. And it gets worse. Every day, 126 people are added to government employment in Britain, while 1440 private sector jobs are eliminated."

Bill bonner;
"They fought the correction; the correction won.

We refer to Bernanke, Summers, Obama, Geithner, Krugman - the whole lot of them. They added three trillion dollars to US debt in the last two years. In two more years the debt will be at 100% of GDP. Add in the debts they've guaranteed - from Fannie Mae, for example, and state and local debt implicitly backed by the feds - and you're already at 150% of GDP. Worse than Greece, in other words."

Bernanke publicly warned congress to cut the deficit. One could deduce that, at some point, the FED will stop buying bonds,,, bond sales will fail,,, GOV will shut down. Jobs will be worse than scarce.

[can't sit still]

Jennifer Lawson PhD. started writing several years ago that the sun controlled our weather. She wrote a book in 2003 predicting major storms in 2004 with a 3 day window. She was quite accurate. Now, NASA has come out and said that increased solar activity is going to greatly affect the earth weather;
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/sc ... 4jun_swef/

The "electric universe" proponents have a LOT of evidence to prove that the universe is controlled by electricity NOT gravity;
http://www.holoscience.com/
Their claims answer a lot of problem questions with current celestial models. You can forget about dark matter and dark energy and string theory.
The inventor, John Bedini claims that the sun drives the earth's rotation just like a homopolar motor. If the universe is indeed controlled by plasma flows, we can expect increased solar activity to affect the actual rotation of the earth.
Jennifer Lawson claims that along with increasingly violent weather, we can expect an increase in earthquakes and volcanism.
She has left research and is writing her memoirs. She did write me to say that the weather would turn very violent after 2010.
Both GB and Ca have had tornadoes,,, not typical. Many countries are experiencing atypical weather. We are also seeing an increase in crustal disturbances.

Reportedly, the numbers are increasing exponentially;
http://www.indiadaily.com/editorial/13772.asp

Apparently, Jennifer is right.... NASA is right.... the Mayans are right.
The third rock from the sun is in for a minor ass-kicking.
A big CME hit would take down everything but fiber optic communication. The occurrences in Quebec demonstrated that a CME will easily take down the grid.
http://www.solarstorms.org/SWChapter1.html
If y'all plan to survive the next 5 years, y'all better have a plan to become a hunter-gatherer.

Another link;
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2 ... ?full=true
Just to make your day, there is news out of GB that is somewhat of a downer;
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... osion.html

[can't sit still]

This is a note on unemployment;

":In a separate incident reported earlier this month by the Huffington Post, The People Place, a job recruiting company, reportedly posted a job description with a message along the bottom that read, “Client will not consider/review anyone NOT currently employed regardless of the reason.â€

[can't sit still]

Here are some writings by a few experienced people who went through the great depression,, including Greenspan;
http://www.thetrumpet.com/index.php?q=7313.7.0.0

[ygmir]

I got my centrifuge.......so, I can start making fuel from WMO......and, it'll run off my solar array.........yay.

[can't sit still]

Can it handle mashed-up peyote buttons? You're in the high desert. Can your centrifuge clean up "bathtub" Gin from juniper berries? What else is it good for? how about cleaning up 'sour mash" ?

[ygmir]

well
it'll "clean up" anything subject to density/weight differential separation.

[can't sit still]

This page talks about survival in the most important sense for a non-agrarian society;
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-0 ... grove.html

[can't sit still]

The world went hog-wild on building production capacity. It paid no attention to suppling spending power commensurate to the availability of goods. Production capacity is in over-supply. Purchasing power is draining away. To preserve market share dozens of countries are racing to the bottom to be the cheapest. This too kills purchasing power and employment.
"Roughly a million Americans have dropped out of the jobs market altogether over the past two months. That is the only reason why the headline unemployment rate is not exploding to a post-war high. "
A million in 2 months !!

"Eight million jobs have been lost.
The average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks. Nothing like this has been seen before in the post-war era"
Biden clearly said that they won't be coming back.

"By our math the crop of people who are unemployed but not receiving a check amounts to 9.2m."
"Congressional Budget Office said fiscal policy will swing from
a net +2pc of GDP to -2pc by late 2011. The states and counties may have to cut as much as $180bn. "
$ 180 billion cut will NOT be good for the employment picture.

"Bank for International Settlements called for combined fiscal and monetary tightening, lending its great authority to the forces of debt-deflation and mass unemployment"
I'd like to see "mass unemployment" for bankers.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comm ... -1932.html

This page has an interesting graph on this crash related to past crashes;
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2010/ ... -time.html
This page blames most of the problem on Obama. That's neither true nor fair;
http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/ar ... isaster%22

http://www.thedailybell.com/1177/Blame- ... Obama.html

I can't find the link now but, Illinois is way worse off than Cal.

The plain and simple truth is that; all the expected benefits from the safety net are not going to happen.
Get to your nearest Haliburton camp early and get a room with a view.

[Sail Man]

your very welcome

[Token]

So how much land in a long growing season state like CA would one need to support a family of four?

Let me narrow it down.

Let's assume the following:

Lots of water for garden and livestock.

Three Sisters technique: Corn, squash, beans.

Let's also assume the following crops:
Tomato
Potato
Pepper
Cabage
Beets
Onion
Garlic
Carrots
Pumpkin

Note: the veggies I selected are either durable for storage or easily cannable. I also looked at protein, oil and carb value. Please add anything I missed.

I would like the option of chicken and pig. The corn production should be designed to support this. They can scavange the rest from the compost heap/worms and any fallen fruit.

I have a varmint gun and don't mind eating squirrel, possum, racoon, etc.

So what can I do to figure this out?

[Trishntek]

Ever heard of the Mother Earth News? Check it out here:

http://www.motherearthnews.com/

I learned many things from them back in the 70's. Apparently, they still offer their archives, for a nominal fee of course.

There is also a book "The Encyclopedia of Country Living" by Carla Emery

http://www.amazon.com/Encyclopedia-Coun ... 157061377X

I highly recommend it!

[can't sit still]

Token, your list looks good but, your profile says that you live in Los Angeles. I'm currently in Van Nuys. I have 2 drums of fuel to bug out. The L.A. area has something like 12 million people. Your garden will be great to cut down on your food bills. If there is an actual shortage of food, people will kill you for what you have. I don't mean to be rude but, the logistics are against you.